Don’t Supersoak Matthew Hoh

I turned the internet on and saw Katherine Tiedemann, the public face of Foreign Policy’s AfPakChannel, tweet a bizarrely defiant message that she is “pointedly not covering or following anything said by or about Matthew Hoh.” Huh? Well, then I guess she won’t mind this post.

It’s a bizarre stance, I think, for a journalist think-tanker to simply rule someone out of bounds. I would understand if Hoh was, say, lying about Hamid Karzai’s birth certificate, or had made some demonstrably untrue statements about his service in Afghanistan. But he hasn’t. He has issued a critique of the war in Afghanistan that emerged from his experience there as a 3161 State Department civilian hire, which he resigned in protest, coming to the conclusion that the war is a hopeless folly. I don’t agree with the critique. But I have been impressed with Hoh’s honesty and clarity in delivering it. And it would be pretty counterproductive and self-deceiving to ignore it.

Katherine tweeted back at me that she doesn’t have any hostility to Hoh, but “confusion as to why he has suddenly become such a huge deal.” It’s simple. Hoh is the highest-ranking civilian official to resign over Afghanistan, an outcome that Amb. Eikenberry and even Richard Holbrooke endeavored to prevent, precisely because they felt it was damaging to the war effort. He’s newsworthy, by any definition. He’s also been overhyped, even by the Washington Post story that broke the news, and portrayed as somewhat more high-ranking than he was. He shouldn’t be overplayed, nor should he be treated as an antiwar trump card. But let’s not let a second-order point about sloppy reporting interfere with our first-order journalistic responsibilities to acquire, assess and critique intelligent perspectives on the Afghanistan war. Hoh has definitely delivered one.